Who's the stiff?

I lately relocated from the Adirondacks to Utah. Utah is much dryer. So much dryer, in fact, that I can easily dry a rackload of cloth diapers in the BASEMENT in less than 12 hours. One upside to gas-forced-air heat. In the Adirondacks, I had to run dehumidifiers in my house even in the winter, so drying indoors on a rack was pretty tough.

Thick diapers dry in less than 12 hours in the desert. Even in your basement!

Since the biggest energy-savings of cloth diapers by far comes from air-drying, getting away from the electric dryer is the way to go. My kid poops in a toilet, so the lack of sunshine isn't a big deal because the diapers don't smell when they come out of the wash.

The main undesirable outcome of indoor air-drying - especially with the dry gas-forced-air heat in such a short amount of time: stiffness.

Incredible house of diapers. Made only of structurally-dried cloth diaper jerky.

You can twist and yank these crusties immediately before use, or you can throw them all in the dryer with a tennis ball on no-heat for ten minutes. Not perfectly soft, but no longer usable as a building material. In any case, tough diapers will encourage your kid to get out of them and onto the pot faster...

1.19 x 10^57 atoms pack a lot of cleaning power

Bleach. HA!

Hot water. HA! HA!

Dryer? meh.

Check out the awesome atomic power of our own sun!
This is a cloth cotton diaper stained with poop. I washed it in cold water with 7th Generation liquid and some vinegar. This picture is post-wash just after I hung it up.


Then I hung it in the sun. Not even the direct sun. It was pretty overcast, but bright. Below is the result.


It hung out there for about 5 hours. During that five hours, I did other things while the atomic power of the sun did its thing. It's too bad my cell phone can't record smells because a line dried diaper should have its own cologne. Maybe I'll pitch it to J-Lo.

Save your money, save the planet. Line dry some stuff.

The Drying Game

I'll write more about general cleaning later. Right now, I'd like to address a radical bit of information - a 2008 study by the UK Environmental Agency. If you go looking for information on the apparent benefit of cloth diapers, you'll find a lot of would-be-greenies shrugging and saying - "well, I guess it's a wash - may as well use disposable."

They actually say that - "it's a wash" - again and again and again. (For shame, Sierra Club). It's like Pampers paid for the slogan to be written.

Some people refer to a 2005 study by the UK EA, but they updated it in 2008. It contains this oft-overlooked nugget:

Combining three of the beneficial scenarios (washing nappies in a fuller load, outdoor line drying all of the time, and reusing nappies on a second child) would lower the global warming impact by 40 per cent from the baseline scenario, or some 200kg of carbon dioxide equivalents over the two and a half years, equal to driving a car approximately 1,000 km.

40% reduction in carbon dioxide. Geez. I guess if you actually try to save energy while using cloth, you might could. Go figure. If you're really into numbers, read this ass-stomping rebuttal dry, factual rebuttal (the link to the good one died...) of the 2005 UK EA study. Maybe that's why they re-did it.

I live in a climate even worse than the UK as far as line-drying clothes goes - so I tried the following experiment: I hung the diapers on a drying rack in the kitchen overnight. It worked fine. The diapers were really stiff and my wife complained - so I now throw them in the dryer on low for 20 minutes first. I could probably get away with 15 minutes.

Now the diapers are softer, and the electric drying time was reduced from 60 minutes to 20 and the temperature from medium to low. And if you think you'll run out of diapers waiting, or need to buy more: I have 24 diapers and I wash them about every other day.

What's really odd to me is that the trumpeters of the British Life Cycle Assessment seem to have hung out to dry any concerns about landfills. Landfills are nasty. They degrade groundwater, they smell, things in them don't biodegrade - contrary to popular opinion (take note biodegradable diaper users: personally, I don't care - just don't be suckered by the packaging).

The discussions about landfill environmental impact are hard to find, because it's just assumed that they are a very bad solution to long-term waste management. My feelings about it go like this: like landfill? Go ahead.

What's at stake is that with cloth, you have choices. You can choose to lower your impact. The decisions you make affect your ecology, your wallet, your shopping habits, and the amount of trash to the curb. If you use disposable, your ability to choose is far more limited.

Up next: A smell just as sweet.